my thoughts on science

An interesting new study has found a link between people's body clocks (chronotype) and their likelihood of being honest. The research found that 'larks' (people who like to get up early) were more ethical in the morning, while 'owls' (late-night people) were more honest at night. Below is the abstract and a link to the paper:

Gunia, Barnes & Sah (2014) The Morality of Larks and Owls: Unethical Behavior Depends on Chronotype as Well as Time-of-Day. Psychological Science (Forthcoming)The recently-documented “morning morality effect” indicates that people act most ethically in the morning because their energy wanes with the day. An estimated 40% of the population, however, experience increased energy levels later in the day. These “evening people,” we propose, should not show the morning morality effect. Instead, they should show the same or an increasing propensity toward ethicality in the evening. Two experiments supported this hypothesis, showing that people with a morning chronotype tend to behave more ethically in the morning than the evening, while people with an evening chronotype tend to behave more ethically in the evening than the morning. Thus, understanding when people will behave unethically may require an appreciation of both the person (chronotype) and the situation (time-of-day): a chronotype morality effect. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2461952